Personal computer systems in general and IBM personal computers in particular have attained widespread use for providing computer power to many segments of today's modern society. Personal computer systems can usually be defined as a desk top, floor standing, or portable microcomputer that consists of a system unit having a single system processor and associated volatile and non-volatile memory, a display monitor, a keyboard, one or more diskette drives, a fixed disk storage, and an optional printer. One of the distinguishing characteristics of these systems is the use of a motherboard, or system planar, to electrically connect these components together. These systems are designed primarily to give independent computing capability to a single user and are inexpensively priced for purchase by individuals or small businesses. Examples of such personal computer systems are IBM's PERSONAL COMPUTER XT and AT and IBM's PERSONAL SYSTEM/2 Models 25, 30, 35, 40, 50, 5,5, 56, 57, 60, 65, 70, 80, 90, and 95.
These systems can be classified into two general families. The first family, usually referred to as Family I Models, use a bus architecture exemplified by the IBM PERSONAL COMPUTER AT and other "IBM compatible" machines. The second family, referred to as Family II Models, use IBM's MICRO CHANNEL bus architecture exemplified by IBM's PERSONAL SYSTEM/2 Models 50 through 80. Many Family I models have used the popular INTEL 8088 or 8086 microprocessor as the system processor. These processors have the ability to address one megabyte of memory. Certain Family I and most Family II models typically use the high speed INTEL 80286, 80386, and 80486 microprocessors which can operate in a real mode to emulate the slower speed INTEL 8086 microprocessor or a protected mode which extends the addressing range from 1 megabyte to 4 Gigabytes for some models. In essence, the real mode feature of the 80286, 80386, and 80486 processors provide hardware compatibility with software written for the 8086 and 8088 microprocessors.
Such personal computers are characterized as having an "open" architecture. That is, the systems are designed and constructed in such a way that additional peripheral devices, such as removable media direct access storage devices (or DASD) may be selected and added to the systems, or an existing device may be changed for a device of a different type. Such peripheral devices may now take the form of pc cards, under the standard established by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (hereafter called, the PCMCIA standard). These pc cards may be classified under two general categories: memory cards and input/output (I/O) cards.
Memory cards were the first generation of cards specified by Release 1.0 of the PCMCIA standard. These cards are file-formatted and are used in substantially the same way as memory diskettes and hard disks. I/O cards are specified in Release 2.0 of the standard. These types of cards include modems, local area networks (LANs), image cards, hard disk drives, faxes, and docking stations. There are three physical sizes for these cards. All three types are 85.0 mm in length, and 54.0 mm in width. Type I are 3.3 mm in thickness; Type II are 5.0 mm; and TypeII, 10.5 mm.
The PCMCIA standard is becoming widely used for connecting peripheral devices to portable and notebook personal computers and may be used for other types of PCs. However, the existing packaging solutions call for connectors or connecting schemes as shown in FIG. 1.
Referring to FIG. 1, there is shown a personal computer system (pc) 10 coupled to a peripheral device 20, in a conventional manner. One end of a flexible cable 12 is connected to a PCMCIA card 14 via a connector 16. The other end of the flexible cable is connected to a printed circuit card 18 inside the peripheral device 20 via a connector 22. The PCMCIA card includes a connector (complying with the PCMCIA standard) that is used to mate with a port (also compliant with PCMCIA standard) inside the PC 10. This arrangement has the detriments of requiring unnecessary connectors and soldering.
In addition there exists a need for convenient, inexpensive, and reliable exchange of data between portable, notebook, or other similar types of computers. The methods currently used for this purpose include: (1) exchanging PCMCIA cards with data written and stored in them, and (2) connecting cable between the serial or parallel ports of two computers. The second approach suffers from the problem that some computers (e.g., palmtops) do not have a parallel port and the serial port is too slow. Additional inconvenience results from the relatively large size of parallel and serial ports, which would make the resulting connectors bulky, heavy, and inconvenient to store on the road.